OTOY Forums

Octane's Scatter on Surface Feature doesn't work as intended in the version 28.14 stable and 29.7 alpha.

Steps to reproduce:
1. File > New > Octane Default Startup
2. Add > Mesh > Plane
3. Create New Material for Plane
4. Setup Simple Scatter On Surface Node Network for Plane

5. Setup Octane Mesh Properties

6. Switch viewport to Rendered View. Note the missing scattered objects.

In order to view the scattered objects you must clear the Octane Geo Node field, and reselect "Scatter on surface" while the viewport is in Rendered mode, however this fix is only temporary. Attempting to render a frame doesn't show the scattered objects as well and clearing rendered cache doesn't work.

In "Material Output" node switch to "Octane" and use "Octane Geometry" input for scatter node.

Just attempted your solution with both versions, unfortunately that leads to the same result.

I’ll test it here to confirm, but everything should be functioning smoothly. Let’s see how it goes.

It works fine on my end. Could you please share your scene so I can take a closer look?

I think I may understand why your scene isn't working as expected. In your case, the Scatter object and the Surface object are the same. Generally, the Scatter object (the one used to manage the Scatter node) should be independent, particularly since it's automatically hidden during rendering.

However, despite this, the render should still function with your setup, so we definitely need to look into fixing this issue.

Thank you for your report.

Hi Lino,

Absolutely, here's the file and what it looks like on my end. I'm not entirely following what you suspect to be the problem, so I hope this file helps clarify my issue! File was created using v29.7.



edit: After giving your response a second reading, I now understand what you mean! Your method above works as expected, I appreciate the explanation.